My Relationship With Music.

It may be one-sided, I confess, and no sound or lyric I produce can repay what music gives to me.

At first, however, music and I didn’t get along.

I used to be able to play piano. I remember my grandmother forcing me to practice, the cats howling and the anger I felt, because I didn’t realize why I had to go through that. I felt I was wasting my time, my grandmother was wasting my time and I could be doing other more normal stuff.

I could be going out and socializing, making friends, connecting with the community and with the world. Maybe, I would see that some people do music and enjoy it. I would then realize that we could do music together and decide I needed to learn music, so I can be a band with a bunch of other kids.

No. Instead, I got the same torment, day after day, no socialization and no explanation as to why I should be doing it, other than “your mother and her sister finished music school”. So what? Why should I care about that?

I was pissed off and upset. I wasn’t a normal kid. I felt and knew that my grandmother’s attempts to force onto me what she thought was a rule in her family took away precious time of childhood fun and innocence.

I quit music school after three years (one preparatory and two actual years).

Then there were the classical music concerts. Those, I liked.

We had a neighbor who played violin for our town’s orchestra. She was also a parent of one of my grandmother’s students and gave us free concert tickets.

I liked going to the concert halls, because it was an event. It was a break from the ordinary daily grind and I appreciated it, even though I wasn’t a big fan of the style and of what I perceived as the pompous vanity of some of the audience members.

I found classical music a bit boring, and it didn’t have what I was subconsciously looking for in sound expression.

We didn’t click.

When I was about eleven years old, on one of our trips abroad my parents bought me the soundtrack from the first Shrek movie and Avril Lavigne’s Best Damn Thing album. I had no time and no portable device to play these CDs on, so I didn’t listen to them much.

I did like their sound expression more than I liked the sound expression of classical music. The beats and the tunes created rhythm and a thematic frame for the songs’ content. And there were words, to which, I, as a devoted reader, could relate. And together, all those things created a story.

However, it wasn’t until I was twelve that I began dating music.

I got my first smartphone then. It was a Nokia that came with a year of free music (“Comes with music” is one of my mottoes), and, one day, I took to browsing their online music catalog.

I already liked Avril Lavigne’s style, so I searched for something similar. I discovered Linkin Park and began my journey of musical healing and self-discovery.

My dates with music were great. We met before sleep, between classes, during P. E., while reading and while doing homework. Our relationship brought joy to my life.

The most important thing about music is that it heals and entertains at the same time. No matter what you’re seeking, these two things are what you’re gonna inevitably get.

I didn’t know what I was seeking back then. I just wanted to have my feelings validated and rock music did just that. On top of that, it helped me wind down and relieve a lot of my stress. It gave me not only validation, but insight into what I was feeling.

You see, my relationship with my mother isn’t good. As a kid, I couldn’t pinpoint what I felt toward her, let alone name it, and rock music introduced me to the concept of a broken heart. That, unexpectedly, described my feelings in a nutshell, and I could progress to anger and depression. I was finally grieving.

That is when I began to really understand music, what it does and how it affects me. Rock opened me up, helped me cope and stay in touch with my emotions, and I connected to it, like yin to yang.

In the following years, we grew closer. We became inseparable, and I felt that music was the only entity that understood me. By seventeen, I was the teenager with headphones on at all times, and I still am at twenty-two.